The Harms children are on their way home from school. Harriett is the oldest, at sixteen, followed by Hervey at fifteen, Edith at thirteen and then tearaway George, the baby of the family, who is just ten years old. Their older siblings, Harry (twenty), Lottie (nineteen) and Annie Maria (seventeen) have all left school and, still living at home, stand at the gateway of their adult lives.
The bullocks make their way slowly out of the yards and down towards the railway, swaying unsteadily. Every time they lie down, the boys shout in their ears, forcing them to take a few steps before they subside once more. The children laugh at the great plump beasts, fattened on the lush green pasturage down the hill, at the end of the street. These bullocks have never been hurried in their lives and see no reason for it now.
‘Come get a Bournemouth Rock,’ shouts the old girl on the corner, ‘and hurry home, it’s five o’clock!’
It is the sweets that make the cattle market so exciting for the youngest Harms children. The pungent liquorice flavours of the round bullseyes, or Edith’s favourite – a prized ‘stick of “Spanish” dispensed [in] minute fragments to envious playmates’.
Guildford is full of such delights. On the weekends the children explore the ruins of the castle or the woods just beyond the town boundaries. They trail along the quiet paths that meander between old stone walls, sprouting a profusion of the sweetest garden flowers. They hunt for birds’ nests (careful to leave them undisturbed), or follow the trail of a butterfly or spider on its homeward path. Or peek into Reverend Dodgson’s garden at the Chestnuts in the hope of glimpsing a white rabbit or a disappearing Cheshire cat, or at the very least of being offered a slice of cake by one of his sisters.
Best of all, they might take a book with them into the woods and fields. All the Harms children love reading, a passion they have inherited from their mother Lottie, who always has time to read to them no matter how busy she is.
‘Barrie, Dickens, Thackeray were household words,’ Edith later recalled. ‘Dickens’ characters were our familiar friends. We knew them all as well as we did each other.’
But this idyllic life is about to change. The peaceful world of the Harms family will be turned upside down. And within a year they will find themselves at the very opposite end of the earth.
WAS IT ONE Tuesday like this that Harriett lagged behind the other three children, complained of a headache or a sore neck, seemed tired and confused? If it was, Edith does not mention it. Edith rarely wrote about her childhood or her family. In fact, she rarely wrote about herself, or other people, at all. Scientists are like that – nor was it the fashion among British nature writers of the time. Edith writes with the ‘eye’ not the ‘I’. I wonder what she would think of today’s ‘new nature writing’, so often a metaphor for the personal: not so much writing about nature, as writing about man in nature.
I wonder what Edith would think of this biography; I suspect that she would prefer a strictly objective authorial voice relating the results of painstaking research, as if a life story is a simple recitation of known facts. I could tell you that story, as if I know everything about her life – from beginning to end. It’s very tempting, in fact, to take on that reassuringly knowledgeable biographer’s voice, to paper over the gaps and pretend they are not there. But I only have small fragments of Edith’s life to piece together and every one I find upends all the others and changes the way I understand her. I didn’t start at the beginning and work to the end. I have been working, intermittently, with Edith for over twenty years. The true delights of research come as much from the process of discovery as from the final conclusions. I think Edith would appreciate that.
My reconstruction of the children’s early life in Guildford comes from a much-loved book in Edith’s library, W. H. Bateman’s Rambling Recollections of Old Guildford, published in 1936. The book now belongs to Peter Harms, Edith’s great-nephew, grandson of her older brother Harry, and the family historian and archivist for the Australian branch of the Harms family. The margins are annotated in pencil, by Edith we originally presumed, but the more I read, the more I realised that the notes must have been written by her youngest brother, George. George also wrote a brief account of his own childhood and adventures. Fragments of Harry’s recollections have been recorded by his son Ivo and passed on to his grandson Peter. As such, Edith’s youngest and oldest brothers are the major source of information about the Harms family before they came to Australia.
Without Peter’s compilation of the Harms’ family history, much of Edith’s childhood would have remained a mystery. But before I could find Peter Harms, I had to find Edith’s immediate family, her descendants. All I knew from her biography was that she was survived by two daughters, one called Dorothy: daughters who might have married and changed their names and become all but untraceable.
Edith’s father, Henry Harms, was one of Guildford’s most successful builders – as well as an architect, undertaker, naturalist and beekeeper. He moved the family here, in around 1886, from nearby Old Woking. Despite the ups and downs of the building trade, business was booming. Henry’s enterprise was so hectic that he kept several apprentices fully occupied, building coffins as well as houses. They had recovered from some disastrous church work – for which they had never been properly paid – and were just in the process of completing a row of terrace houses for a fine profit. Lady Bouverie’s estate at Send was also
